Trained to avoid rushing to judgment, we historians know there will be far more to learn about Monday’s Montreal bloodbath, wherein a terrorist killed one police officer and one civilian.

The police claim the terrorist was not antisemitic and that the resulting murder of a beloved Jew in the Jewish neighborhood attacked is coincidental.

Assuming that conclusion holds, Canadians and their leaders must admit that even if antisemitism didn’t trigger this crime, the lynch-mob mentality against Jews, Zionism, and Israel drove it as well as other acts of political violence. The same argument holds when terrorists attack areas with no Jews at all. It’s essential to recognize that by tolerating so much antisemitism and “Zionophobia” – hostility toward Zionists – many Canadians helped foster an atmosphere of political totalitarianism breeding extremism, zealotry, and violence.

Silence often speaks volumes. Those who keep quiet while others harass Jews, Israelis, and Zionists broaden the zone of tolerance for all forms of brutality. In healthy democracies, there are no innocent bystanders; when fellow citizens are besieged, silence is complicity.

Lack of public reaction to antisemitism

Jesse Brown opens his March 2026 Atlantic essay, “Canada’s Polite Pogrom,” with a devastating line. Describing how the University of British Columbia’s Ed Rosenberg quit teaching geriatric medicine after 30 years, Brown explains that the antisemitic bile students and colleagues at the University of British Columbia posted after October 7 was bad enough. Nevertheless: “He did not resign because of the messages…; he resigned because the university wouldn’t do anything about them.”

Antisemites around him could be dismissed – it’s hard to feel betrayed by twisted people who celebrated such perversions. But Rosenberg and so many others have felt betrayed by so-called “innocent bystanders” and supposedly responsible administrators who did nothing.

The insult is compounded by a cancel culture and DEI bureaucracy exaggerating the slightest slips into massive grievances – when it comes to other groups. Selective silence is equally painful, double-crossing the targeted – and emboldening aggressors. On June 1, Prime Minister Mark Carney modeled the kind of political cherry-picking that justifies using the cliché “doing more harm than good.”

Carney’s 2600-word speech about antisemitism never used the Z-word, Zionism, and only mentioned Israel once. That’s like denouncing Southern racism without defining it as an obsessive bigotry against blacks.

Linking anti-Zionism with antisemitism is not some Jewish delusion; it’s a conscious stance wired deeply into the Palestinian national movement’s DNA. Palestinians and their enablers yell “Death to the Jews” and target Jewish schools, synagogues and individuals when they’re enraged by Israel.

Palestinians and their enablers recycle old Jewish stereotypes and dip their anti-Zionism in the toxic reservoir of anti-Semitic slurs. And it’s Palestinians and their enablers who have fed a spike of Jew-hatred since October 7, because the antisemitic anti-Zionism of Hamas and other Gazans on that bloody day inspired them. Carney’s omission was particularly glaring because he o so earnestly, speaking in French, invoked the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor to explain Canada’s “celebration of differences.”

That acceptance reflects Taylor’s notion of “recognition,” Carney explained, which “is more than mere tolerance…. To be recognised is to be received as who you are.” How ironic that in this speech Canada’s prime minister refused to recognize or receive how Zionists are – or admit how much they have been pursued.

These full and partial silences help amplify today’s shouters, who continue to believe they run the conversation. They dominate the airwaves, the headlines, and social media. Today’s loud, often foul-mouthed, hotheads view everything through a partisan lens – which paves the road to totalitarianism.

Reducing our complex world to a series of all-or-nothing political propositions oversimplifies and inflames discourse simultaneously. Extremists thrive in this highly charged atmosphere. They make politics tribal – us versus them. And they escalate identity into zealotry.

Belonging is no longer enough. Bullying the other becomes expected, fundamental – first, most easily, in Tweets, then in words to strangers, then in breakups over politics with friends and relatives. Once that happens, once you’ve demonized and objectified the other, it’s easy for unstable maniacs to turn violent. After all, everyone else has convinced them that if you dare disagree with me – you’re an existential threat to me and our democracy.

Canada’s turn from Canada the decent and delightfully boring, to Canada the indecent and menacing, reflects this evil logic’s spellbinding power. Of course, not every terrorist or partisan firebrand is a Jew-hater or an anti-Zionist. But Jew-hating and Israel-bashing green-lighted a culture of political fervor and abuse.

We now live in a world – in democracies – where healthy functioning adults – not just lunatics – act crazy. They shun colleagues and friends, harass shopkeepers or customers, hit little kids, shoot their schools, and assault their places of worship, proudly, while earning high-fives in return.

For decades we’ve known in theory – it starts with the Jews, but never ends with the Jews. The words were mouthed – and are mouthed whenever Jews are targeted. We need more than words. The twin evil genies of Jew-hatred and political violence, which have long been intertwined, have been unleashed, and Jews aren’t responsible for returning either foul force into its bottle.

Jews should focus on defending themselves just enough to feel free to double down on being Zionist, doing Jewish, and celebrating Israel. It’s the much larger non-Jewish world that must remember two long-lasting lessons. Jew-hatred is the disease of the non-Jew, not the Jew.

And citizens in healthy democracies must defeat the totalitarian, conspiratorial, violence-breeding evil of antisemitism, doing it, not for the Jews’ sake, but for the sake of their own societies, and their own souls.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Jew-hatred drove the Montreal violence, even if it didn’t trigger it first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 2 million Jews arrived in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. This mass immigration turned New York into the cornerstone of Diaspora Jewry and cemented its status as the largest Jewish city in the world. From this vast community emerged a long line of Jewish politicians with historic influence. Chief among them is Sen. Chuck Schumer.

Schumer currently serves as Senate minority leader, after serving as majority leader from 2020 to 2024 under the Biden administration. He is the Jew elected to the highest office in American history and for many years placed the cultivation and strengthening of U.S.-Israel ties at the top of his agenda. In recent years, however, Schumer has been forced to contend with growing pressure inside his party, leading him to adopt more cautious positions.

In recent years, we have witnessed a troubling and dangerous shift in New York City. Beyond the broader rise in hostility toward Israel, there is a growing trend of candidates being elected to public office precisely on that ticket. The driving force behind this profound change is the radical wing of the Democratic Party, especially the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA.

The peak of this radicalization process was reflected in the election of DSA figure Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City. Mamdani has pursued a hostile and extreme line against Israel, including a conspicuous refusal to take part in the Israel parade.

The mayor-elect has called for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest, and his policies are reflected on the ground in his veto of municipal legislation intended to prevent intimidating protests outside Jewish schools.

His attitude toward Israel and the Jewish community is clearer than ever, as seen in the sharp attack he launched last week against the AIPAC lobby, which he called a “monster.”

Despite these positions, he continues to enjoy enormous popularity. Mamdani bet on support for radical candidates such as Claire Valdez, Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier. The long line of people waiting in a park to take selfies with him after the Knicks won the NBA championship shows the depth of his support. In effect, New York underwent a political upheaval overnight: Mamdani’s candidates won, and supporters of Israel received a warning sign.

The danger of Chevalier

The most worrying focal point is Chevalier, who defeated veteran Rep. Adriano Espaillat in District 13. Chevalier’s background, including her conversion to Islam, dovetails with her extreme political positions against Israel. At the same time, the hostile atmosphere directed at Jewish elected officials is evident, and troubling footage shows her organizing the pro-Palestinian protest held just two days after the October 7 massacre.

This toxic atmosphere is seeping into the city’s streets and creating the painful sense that Jews are no longer welcome in their own home, as reflected in reports of growing feelings of insecurity.

The case of Jewish Rep. Dan Goldman, who lost the primary to Brad Lander, offers a glimpse into the loss of a sense of safety among Jewish figures in the public sphere. Lander, identified with the far-left wing, has become a vocal critic of Israel and has led a sharply oppositional line against its policies. Goldman was disgracefully expelled this week from a cafe in his own city, an incident that illustrates the depth of the rupture.

The current election campaign centered in large part on the demand to halt arms sales to Israel, a watershed issue for the winning candidates who sanctified their hostility. From the outside, New York, the city that created the Israel parade in the 1960s, is now becoming the spearhead of the fight against it.

Anyone who sees all this as an inevitable “demographic process” is wrong and misleading others. This is cold, calculated political engineering. In midterm primaries, candidates are elected on the basis of just tens of thousands of votes in safe seats. This system allows for the relatively easy takeover of districts, flooding Congress and local authorities with radical representatives, just as the Tea Party did to the Republican Party, only in the opposite and more extreme direction.

This is a systematic attempt, from within, to change the DNA of the Democratic Party and turn it into a fringe party. Americans watching from the sidelines understand that this is a culture war over the character of America. If the Democratic Party does not stop this internal radicalization, it may find itself not only out of power in 2026 and 2028, but completely disconnected from the American public in whose name it claims to speak.

Published on Ynet

The post New York: from global Jewish capital to anti-Israel hub first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Political violence is like pollution – no matter what the source, it threatens everyone. Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, the great 20th-century sage, explained that Jews still fast, mourning the assassination of Gedaliah ben Ahikam in 586 B.C.E., because “the enemy was not from without but from within… It serves as a reminder that we are our own worst enemy when we allow internal strife to eclipse our shared identity.” Nevertheless, this third assassination attempt against President Donald Trump triggered another round of hypocritical attacks blasting political violence – from the other side.

On CNN, Dana Bash asked Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who has called Trump a “fascist,” a “tyrant” and a “gangster” guilty of “murder”: “You have, as many of your fellow Democrats, have, used some heated rhetoric against the president. And do you think twice about that when something like this happens?” Raskin stunned everyone by sounding stunned, asking: “What rhetoric do you have in mind?” Similarly, Trump’s press secretary blamed the assault on the Democrats’ “systemic demonization” of Trump amid a “left-wing cult of hatred.”

This is not the pathway to healing. Sanctimonious calls for unity in between partisan rants only backfire. Speaking out of one side of your mouth won’t stop this scourge. All must condemn left-wing, right-wing and Jihadi terrorism consistently. Today’s scorching political rhetoric fuels this exhibitionist violence, as indoctrination eclipses inquiry, certainty banishes uncertainty, and demonization discourages debate – online, on the air and even in too many classrooms.

Increasingly, with only one in four attending religious services weekly, Americans are replacing their grandparents’ overriding faith in religion with political orthodoxy. Many fill the God-sized holes in their hearts with simplistic slogans shortcircuiting their brains – and curdling their souls. More and more seek out romantic partners who agree with them politically, while avoiding conversations with those who dare to disagree.

This polarized environment has even colored how people view the violent acts that recently wracked the nation. Three-quarters of Democrats deemed the 2020 George Floyd protests peaceful – despite rioting that caused over a billion dollars of damage and killed dozens – while 54% of Republicans deemed the protests violent. Yet, 81% of Democrats called the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riot an “insurrection,” with 74% of Republicans disagreeing.

Partisans keep confusing ends and means. Believing in your cause doesn’t require justifying violence carried out in its name. Actually, the most fervent believers carry special responsibility – they have the street cred among their comrades to discourage violence.

Instead, while pro-Palestinian groups have been most identified with the dishonorable, nihilistic, antidemocratic (and antisemitic) cry “by any means necessary,” it’s become an all-purpose rationale whenever your allies overreach. We need the opposite. We need Palestinian and Muslim activists condemning anti-Zionist and anti-Western Jihadi terrorism, socialists decrying the December 2024 murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, liberals mourning Charlie Kirk and conservatives condemning attacks targeting Democrats ranging from Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi to Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro.

Instead, too many political leaders and influencers are so angry, they forget that their political rivals are fellow citizens too. In November, President Trump condemned six Democratic lawmakers for “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Even all the Washington “swamp” talk is rabble-rousing – swamps are toxic and must be drained.

Similarly, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) shouldn’t have called the duly-elected President of the United States an “existential threat to democracy,” while her Michigan congressional colleague Rashida Tlaib (D) shouldn’t have branded him a “war criminal.” And anyone romanticizing the murderer of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO, or, like the influencer Hasan Piker, invoking “social murder” to “explain” it, is part of the problem.

Amid so much media noise, with social media creating Algorithmic Radicals, spiraling deeper and deeper into violence-inducing echo chambers, many believe the shriller the better. But words matter – and tone matters too. It’s no better to have Candace Owens calling Democrats “demonic” than for Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, Professor Robert Reich, to say “Donald Trump poses a threat to civilization.”

In “The Nature of Prejudice” (1954), Harvard’s legendary social psychologist, Gordon Allport, studied racism to show how words can kill. His five-point scale built from “verbal violence” – trash-talking – to snubbing, discriminating, wounding then killing. With so many angry, lost, broken Americans today, the overheated rhetoric creates armies of rageoholics ready to fight on the street – or hunt down political enemies.

Long before the Internet monetized today’s aggression-attention economy, America seemed addicted to political violence – roused by waves of barn-burners. Historians have long speculated about what causes this bloody red-white-and-blue affliction. It’s resulted in four martyred presidents, Civil War, and so many riots – against immigrants in the 1850s and by immigrants resisting the draft in the 1860s; by antiwar forces and pro-war forces a century later; and by racists against Blacks, and by Blacks against racism, among other manifestations. The violence may come from America’s wild, rollicking, frontier origins; many demagogues’ need to rally around some enemy; the alienation people feel in such a diverse, rootless, mobile, society; or the anxiety they feel amid America’s dynamic but chaotic economy.

Often, like today, high-stakes clashes over complicated challenges leave even reasonable people worried that their political opponents pose unreasonable threats.

Fortunately, America also has a rich history of leaders who stirred what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” George Washington faced down a potential mutiny with his Newburgh Address in 1783, warning that “the flood Gates of Civil discord” would only “deluge our rising Empire in Blood.” By simply fumbling with his spectacles, the aging general broadcast a sense of humility and patriotism that calmed the furies.

In 1838, Abraham Lincoln’s “Lyceum Address” offered a “simple” answer to the great threat that most feared America faced –  collective suicide through internal dissension: “Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.”

And in 1968, still mourning his beloved brother John’s 1963 assassination, Robert Kennedy soothed angry mourners in Indianapolis minutes after Martin Luther King’s murder. RFK proclaimed: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another….”

If our leaders, our social media influencers, our Facebook “friends” cannot model such behavior – these historical voices must resonate throughout the land. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was filled with Trump Administration officials – and critics. But bullets, like pollutants, threaten everyone, whether they’re on the wrong side or not.

Americans need not bury the hatchet – but we must lower the rhetorical temperature. Jews have long appreciated the power of machloket, constructive, even if impassioned, debate. The Progressive educator John Dewey was right: “Democracy begins in conversation.” But democracy only survives when watered with self-doubt, open-mindedness, and respect for our fellow-citizens – especially when they exasperate us.

Published in Jewish Journal

The post Are Americans Finally Ready to Denounce Violence — Left, Right and Jihadist? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

The special character of contemporary antisemitism is that it emanates from both the right and the left. Just a few years ago, the “new antisemitism” seemed to be a strictly left-wing affair, tied to the Israel-Palestine conflict and informed by the “Red-Green Alliance” between the Western Left and Islamist groups. Right-wing Israeli and Jewish commentators emphasized that fact and added it to the advantages of identification with the Republican Party and other conservative groups.

But in the last year and a half, this picture has been fractured by the emergence of virulently antisemitic right-wing “influencers” such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes and the cover they are provided by political and media figures such as Vice President JD Vance and Tucker Carlson.

Many commentators have expressed surprise at this development. Yet should this really be surprising? Hadn’t xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment and discrimination against various groups (starting with Native peoples and African chattel slaves) been intrinsic to America, at various times and in various circumstances, since its inception? Furthermore, conspiracy theories demonizing Jews and others may be a deeply rooted byproduct of modernity. One strong tradition in American politics, once associated with Southern Democrats but, since the 1960s, increasingly tied to the Republicans, holds that true membership in American society, with its rights and privileges, belonged to white, Protestant men, especially those who had been part of the American social fabric for generations. Such membership is not open to all people of any background who enter into the American social contract, but rather to a group with specific racial, ethnic, religious and gender characteristics.

On the margins of this restricted conception of belonging were organizations and movements that were more extremist in their racism, antisemitism and advocacy of conspiracy theories – the Ku Klux Klan in the 1880s and 1920s, Father Coughlin and the American Nazi Party in the 1930s; and Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wisc.) and the John Birch Society in the 1950s and ‘60s. While these extremist actors and movements have only intermittently become significant political factors, they should not be relegated to the “lunatic fringe.” Rather, they are structurally related to the “more moderate” mainstream.

A key trait of extremist groups is that they traffic in conspiracy theories, especially those involving Jews. Since the Middle Ages, Jews and other groups, such as Freemasons and witches, have often been described as secret players in a conspiracy to take over the world and enslave, dispossess, or even kill other populations. According to these theories, Jews play this role as agents of the devil or some other principal of cosmic evil.

Such thinking seems to be a result (in one fashion or another) of anomie or anomia, a concept first advanced by Émile Durkheim, the late 19th-century “father of sociology.” It refers to a social state of normlessness, that is, when the social norms that permit social interaction are unknown (or cannot be known), unclear or unable to be implemented. Durkheim showed that in such situations where individuals are cut off from social life, they will, among other things, engage in self-destructive behavior. This situation can be caused, among other factors, by rapid change in both negative and positive directions, either rapid impoverishment or rapid enrichment.

In essence, anomia means that the social world has stopped making sense. In such a situation, one might be susceptible to the suggestion that the forces governing the social world are hidden and generally malevolent, perhaps a conspiracy brewed by witches or Jews. Some have suggested that belief in conspiracy theories grants a feeling of having privileged knowledge, together with a sense of control. It has been hypothesized that the outbreak of one grand, hugely murderous conspiracy theory, the European witch craze (1480-1650), which resulted in the execution of 50,000 women and men, was linked to widespread moral confusion and anomie – feelings of living in an alien and indifferent universe in which, because of the religious wars, death and destruction became ends in their own right.

The emergence of conspiratorial antisemitism around the turn of the 20th century, embodied, above all, in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” also seems to be related to moral and social chaos and anomie. This arose from rapid industrialization and urbanization in Europe, especially in Germany, and later from the mass, mechanized killing of World War I. Today, too, there appears to be a great deal of moral confusion and the widespread feeling that American society does not enable a meaningful and productive life. This is evident in the “deaths of despair” of middle-aged, lower-class white men, the epidemic of Fentanyl addiction across all classes, and the feeling of Gen-Z young adults that they will never achieve the fundamental attributes of American middle-class existence – one’s own home, good health insurance, adequate retirement savings.

We should not be surprised that conspiratorial antisemitism has reemerged in the current circumstances. But there is a deep reason that ties it specifically to the right. One of the major and recurrent generators of anomie since the end of the Middle Ages has been the clash of traditional markers of collective identity – race, ethnicity, religion – with the increasingly rationalized and technological means of production on the one hand, and the increase of social criticism based on liberal reason that traces back to the 18th-century Enlightenment and extends to the current “progressive” ideology. The contemporary “woke” mindset applies the rational, liberal ideals of equality and freedom to new areas of criticism – not only to gender, but to sexual orientation and behavior. Whether such criticism has value or utility can be contested, but it has certainly contributed to a pervasive moral confusion and lack of normative clarity.

Today’s anomie and the conspiracy theories that spring from it (including about Jews) may be an ironic byproduct of modernity. We should not be surprised by them, but rather focus our energies on mitigating them as we do with other unwanted byproducts of modernity, like other various forms of pollution.

Published in the Jewish Journal

The post Should We Be Surprised by Right-Wing Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

“In a globalized world, there is a sense among Jews that, unlike the past, there is no far-flung land to escape to,” said Hirschhorn. “It seems for Jews that there is a calculus of the lesser of evils. Jews no longer have any one safe harbor—it is now a question of relative safety in a dangerous world.”

Hirschhorn also points to a troubling shift in the nature of antisemitism. Traditional right-wing antisemitism, she notes, has been reinvigorated in parts of the West amid economic disruption. At the same time, it has been joined by what she describes as a new and virulent strain of “anti-Zionist antisemitism.”

While there may have been some efforts to make Jew-hatred more unpalatable in polite society, Hirschhorn said, “open and even violent hatred toward ‘Zionism,’ ‘Zios,’ ‘Israel’ ‘Israelis’, and ‘Supporters of Israel’ has been given a new carte blanche.”

For the full article in the Wall Street Journal, click here.

The post Jews Begin to Wonder: Is Anywhere Safe? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

The recent municipal elections in France resonate far beyond the local ballot box. The collapse of the center, the rise of the extremes, and a new alliance between the democratic left and antisemitic radicalism are a dress rehearsal for 2027.

On one side, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left party, La France Insoumise (LFI), which didn’t hold a single seat on any municipal council, has now entered hundreds of councils and captured real cities for the first time. On the other side, the far right took approximately 40% of the vote and clinched dozens of mayoral races. The center seems to have collapsed. According to current polls, Mélenchon has a real chance of reaching that final round as the standard-bearer of the left. His political movement has weaponized hostility toward Israel, and his ties to Islamist networks are well-documented. President Emmanuel Macron rose up on the ruins of the French left, and Mélenchon has harvested the fruit.

The paradox is that Macron himself paved the way. When he rose to power in 2017, the Socialist Party was in its death throes. Five years of Hollande’s failed presidency had left it at a historic low. Macron, who had served as Hollande’s Minister of the Economy, did not try to heal it. He set out to inherit its voters, recruiting moderate leftists alongside conservatives tired of the old guard, with one message: only he stood between the Republic and extremism. The Socialist candidate took just 6% of the vote in 2017. A party that had governed France for decades was erased in a single night. Not everyone voted for Macron. Workers, farmers, and the people of “deep France” who felt left behind drifted toward Marine Le Pen. Urban intellectuals, the French equivalents of Bernie Sanders voters in the US and Jeremy Corbyn voters in the UK, were left without a political home. Mélenchon did not wait for the collapse. He left the Socialist Party in 2008 and founded LFI in 2016. When the Socialists were trounced in 2017, he was already standing ready in the breach.

Mélenchon’s vision, what he calls the “New France” has native-born French and the children of immigrants united against a common enemy: the establishment, the bankers, the United States – and Israel.

In 2022, he won 22% of the vote and missed the second round by just 600,000 ballots. Jérôme Fourquet, a senior analyst at the research firm IFOP (Institut français d’opinion publique) describes Mélenchon’s strategy plainly as an appeal to Muslims in working-class neighborhoods who had never gone to the polls, united by enemies rather than a platform. October 7 handed him his opportunity: he justified the massacre, called Israel an apartheid state, and accused French Jews of dual loyalty. Members of his parliamentary group marched where calls for jihad were heard. Mélenchon refused to designate Hamas a terrorist organization. This is not political criticism. It meets a different definition: political antisemitism.

Before the first round, the Socialists and the Greens announced a break with Mélenchon, condemning his “intolerable” antisemitic provocations. But once the results were in, they came back to him. City by city – Toulouse, Lyon, Grenoble, Nantes, Brest, Avignon – all ended up in the same camp. What had been presented as a moral rupture dissolved into what Olivier Faure, deputy of the French National Assembly, now calls “technical mergers.” The calculation was not moral. It was demographic. For every Jewish voter in these cities there are 20 Muslim voters. Without LFI, the moderate left cannot win. Macron atomized the Socialist Party. What remains survives only in Mélenchon’s shadow.

That choice will not save it. Mélenchon is not a partner. He is a swallower. The heirs of Jean Jaurès, who risked his career to defend Dreyfus, are lending legitimacy to a man who refuses to condemn Iran. Selling their soul will only accelerate their demise. Mélenchon is not simply an antisemite with an electoral strategy. His program follows the failed model of Hugo Chávez. Venezuela, sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves, could not feed its own people, and most of its Jewish community left during his presidency. But Chávez did not sit on the UN Security Council, did not control nuclear weapons, and was not the anchor of the European project. The consequences of a Mélenchon presidency would not be for France alone; they would also be Europe’s.

French Jews are reading the map. A recent poll found that a large majority say they will leave if he is elected. A longstanding community does not start packing its bags out of paranoia. It does so out of rational lucidity.

The pre-show is over. French democracy may not survive 2027.

Published on Ynet.

The post An antisemite could be France’s next president first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

ALL EYES ON KHAMENEI

The U.S.–Israeli strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with several other leaders of the Iranian regime, set off notably different reactions. For millions of Iranians, Khamenei had long symbolised suffocation: prisons filled with dissidents, crushed protests, executions, and mourning mothers. When news of his death spread, the reaction in many Iranian cities was relief. People danced. Cautiously, they allowed themselves to breathe.

The reaction to Khamenei’s death did not unfold in a single moral register. A very different response began to organise itself, methodically, thousands of miles away. Within twenty-four hours, the ANSWER Coalition began coordinating protests across the United States under the banner ‘Stop the War on Iran!’ Demonstrations took place in fifty-five cities on March 2, 2026 with plans for ‘international expansion underway.’

The People’s Forum, a professional activist organisation and ‘a home’ for over 200 left-wing groups in Manhattan, described as an ‘incubator’ for ‘the working class,’ ‘internationalism,’ and ‘movement building’ moved just as quickly to frame the narrative. Its message has been unequivocal: ‘the greatest source of chaos in the Middle East isn’t Iran – its U.S. imperialism and Zionism!’ Also present at the demonstrations were CODEPINK, a feminist organisation known for its ‘anti-imperialist campaigns,’ and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a self-proclaimed American revolutionary Marxist party.

The self-proclaimed left of Jewish politics in the United States was also implicated. The National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which has acted as a lobby for the Iranian regime in the United States, issued a statement declaring the war ‘a betrayal’ of ‘American voters,’ and claimed that its true aim was ‘to fulfill Benjamin Netanyahu’s vision of ruling over the rubble of the Middle East.’ J Street, which describes itself as ‘the political home and voice for pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy Americans’, has cooperated with NIAC.

Part of the radical Left that is now in power spoke up for the interests of the Iranian regime. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) – the party of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani – issued a statement entitled ‘DSA Stands against Imperialist War and with the Iranian People.’ DSA described the joint U.S.–Israeli operation as ‘a continuation of the hybrid war that has been waged against Iran since its popular revolution in 1979.’ It is worth recalling that on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on Israel, DSA members rallied under the banner ‘resistance is justified when people are occupied’, and walked through the streets of New York chanting ‘700,’ the first reported Israeli death toll from the Hamas massacre the day before.

There were similar sentiments from the radical Left in the U.K. In a statement addressed to prime minister Keir Starmer, Your Party, an alliance of Islamists and leftists, declared that ‘the unprovoked attack on Iran by the United States and Israel is a war of aggression that endangers us all.’ One founder of Your Party is Jeremy Corbyn, a former leader of the Labour Party whose tenure was marked by an upsurge of antisemitism. On March 7, 2026 thousands of pro–Iranian regime demonstrators marched through central London chanting anti-Israeli and anti-American slogans while holding placards bearing Khamenei’s face and the words ‘Choose the Right Side of History.’ Speaking to the crowd, Zarah Sultana, a Your Party MP, said ‘Another Labour government, another U.S. president launching an illegal war. Shame on them.’

FEMINISTS FOR PATRIARCHY

Among the protestors in London were women’s rights activists dressed in the crimson robes and white bonnets of The Handmaid’s Tale, the novel published by Margaret Atwood in 1985. The costume symbolises a society in which women’s bodies are regulated by clerical authority. Atwood herself noted that the images of women in black chadors following the Iranian Revolution were among the inspirations for her book.[i] The London protestors, however, inverted the symbolism, turning a costume meant to warn against theocracy into a defence of a theocratic, patriarchal regime.

ROOTS OF REVOLUTION

None of this was surprising. The world has witnessed since October 7 a constellation of organisations and political parties marching en masse through Western capitals, with chants of ‘Long live Hamas’ treated as a natural extension of radical Left politics. Seen in this light, the Iran protests are the latest expression of the alliance between Islamists and today’s anti-imperialists of the radical Left. It is an alliance often described as a marriage of convenience. Islamists are said to manipulate credulous Western leftists who fail to grasp the ideological commitments of their partners. However, this explanation is too charitable.

It was American philosopher Judith Butler who defined the nature of the relationship between Islamists and the radical Left, that it is not an alliance but a common cause. She said in 2006 during a UC Berkeley event that ‘understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.’ While a week after the October 7 Hamas attacks she condemned Hamas’s violence, she went on to state in March 2024 at a panel in Paris hosted by the New Anticapitalist Party that the massacre was ‘armed resistance,’ ‘not a terrorist attack’ and ‘it’s not an antisemitic attack.’

Much of the outrage at Butler focused on the falseness of her statements. In retrospect, what mattered was not her inaccuracies, but her candour. She articulated the ideology of many in the radical Left, that Islamist movements are legitimate anti-imperial insurgencies and Hamas, a proxy of the Iranian regime, is an armed resistance group. The radical Left that stands for secularism and opposes any hint of religious coercion in the West gives a central place in its world view to Middle Eastern terrorist movements rooted in radical Islamist ideology.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

The radical Left’s incorporation of Islamism began with its identification with Palestinian militants. Jason Burke traces the lineage of these connections in his new book The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s. The New Left, as that era’s radicals were known, turned outward. They were disillusioned with Soviet communism and increasingly contemptuous of the working class, which these leftists believed had been absorbed into the welfare state and seduced by capitalist consumerism. The New Left sought what it imagined to be the last remaining reservoirs of authentic resistance to capitalism and the West.

Most of the New Left radicals, along with the militants from the Middle East they encountered, defined themselves as anti-Western. They belonged to one Marxist denomination or another: Maoists, Leninists, Trotskyists, and Fidelists. Despite their apparent rejection of the West, their ideas were built upon a schema incubated entirely within Western thought. Their theories of violence, liberation, and historical destiny bore the imprint of German Romanticism and the revolutionary traditions of France and Russia.[ii] These progenitors of today’s radical Left shared a fully formed worldview and a commitment to radical and irrevocable social transformation with Middle Eastern militants. From this common foundation they sought to forge a transnational network of anti-imperial insurgency and ‘Third World’ solidarity.

Among the notable characters detailed by Burke, is Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, best known for her involvement in airplane hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She has since became an icon of revolutionary chic for the anti-imperial left, her image sporting a soft cap not dissimilar to those popularised by Mao and a keffiyeh is reproduced on posters for radical student movements and communist groups in Europe and the United States. In 2020, Leeds University hosted a panel discussion with Khaled about the importance of transnational resistance.

Middle Eastern militant organisations recognised in the radical Left not merely useful allies, but powerful amplifiers within the cultural capitals of Europe and the United States. The radical Left, in turn, saw in the militants of the Middle East a new revolutionary vanguard. The coming revolution would originate far away, in Asia, Africa, Latin America or the Middle East – places where the masses were ready to rise up and fight against the forces of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.

However, this analysis produced a strategic dilemma. The adversary was not a single leader, government, or corporation. It was an expansive global system of political and economic power. Confronted with such a diffuse enemy, it was never clear how a handful of kidnappings, assassinations, or guerrilla training camps could meaningfully bring that system down. That is part of why Israel became their primary target.

The great scholar of conspiracy theory, Jovan Byford, notes that in the 1970s, ‘the far left in Britain and on the continent [Europe] viewed Middle Eastern politics almost exclusively through the prism of Soviet anti-Zionism.’ In 1970, the CIA complained that ‘the Soviets have succeeded in making the New Left anti-Zionist.’[iii]

As Soviet antizionist propaganda networks expanded in the 1960s, many radicals of the period were convinced to regard the Jewish state as a particularly vivid example of what they believed to be capitalist decay and colonial domination. Simultaneously, Israel appeared to them small and vulnerable enough to challenge through acts ‘direct action.’ By embracing antizionism, they imagined they were striking at a pressure point in a corrupt Euro-American ‘imperial order,’ helping to accelerating its unraveling.

Few figures embodied this transformation more clearly than Meinhof, Ulrike Meinhof. With her comrades in the German Red Army Faction she travelled to PLO camps in Lebanon and Jordan, where she trained alongside Arab militants and absorbed the lexicon of armed struggle. Meinhof believed that postwar West Germany was merely fascism in a liberal guise, and that Israel represented the militarised outpost of Western imperialism. For her and her comrades, violence against the Jewish state would awaken the Western masses from their bourgeois complacency. Israel, as a state born from European catastrophe yet aligned with U.S. power, became a symbol of everything the anti-imperial imagination sought to negate.

FROM QUTB TO KHOMEINI

Even as these secular revolutionaries were staging their global revolution, another ideological current was gathering strength in the Middle East. In 1964, Sayyid Qutb, a leading ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, published Milestones. In it, he declared contemporary Muslim societies to be sunk in jahiliyya – pre-Islamic ignorance – and called for ‘a vanguard’, in the Leninist sense, to wage jihad against foreign empire and what he termed ‘World Jewry.’[iv] Qutb absorbed elements of anti-colonial rhetoric, but he embedded them within a totalising religious vision and cited Islamic texts. While the Muslim Brotherhood’s opposition to imperialism and Zionism matched that of the secular Arab militants, their proposed alternative was very different. The only solution was an Islamic state.[v]

Qutb’s ideas resonated in a region humiliated by Israel’s stunning military victory in 1967, authoritarian stagnation, and economic failure. The Islamist project expanded. By the mid-to late 1970s, many Middle Eastern Marxists began abandoning imported European ideologies in favour of Islamism that felt indigenous and transcendent. Instead of class struggle, they spoke of divine sovereignty. Their revolutionary zeal remained; the metaphysical horizon changed.

This popularisation of Islamism reached its most consequential expression in the 1979 Iranian revolution. The Islamic Revolution demonstrated the transformative power of the new synthesis. Ruhollah Khomeini spoke of revolution, social justice, and anti-imperialism. He also was well versed in Maoism and the likes of Franz Fanon, but he rooted concepts in Shia theology and clerical authority. He spoke of an ‘Imperialist-Jewish conspiracy’ and condemned ‘Western imperialism’, while urging his followers to ‘export our revolution to the world.’[vi] Khomeini’s language suggested the influence of the leftist ideologies that had made such a mark on the Middle East over previous decades – despite his own visceral contempt for their adherents.

Having not previously admitted the existence of tabaqeh or ‘class’ as an analytic category, Khomeini begun using the concept in his speeches to mobilise the masses. Terms common to Middle East Marxists such as enqelab (revolution), and jumhori (republic), crept in too, as well as a series of familiar binary divisions. ‘The poor were battling against the rich; the inhabitants of the slums against inhabitants of the palaces; the needy against the aristocrats.’[vii] The result of the revolution was more than a change of government. It was the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a state that fused populism, anti-Americanism, and virulent antizionism with a religious narrative.

The establishment of the Islamic Republic was the main change from the ideological convergence between the radical Left and Middle Eastern militants. Islamists and radical Left intellectuals now were united by a shared conviction that existing power structures could be overturned by force. Michel Foucault, the high-priest of postmodernism, had traveled to Iran as a special correspondent for Corriere della Sera in 1978 on the eve of the revolution. What he encountered there electrified him. For the next few years he wrote glowingly in over 80 articles about Iran’s Islamic revolution in the French press. He believed he was witnessing something that modern political theory had overlooked: a revolution not driven by ‘technocracy’ or ‘western rationalism’, but by what he called ‘political spirituality’. Something powerful enough to ‘overturn the systems of power.’[viii]

The demonstrations after Khamenei’s death, the pledges of allegiance to the Iranian regime and indeed the large antizionist demonstrations over the last two years, are the continuation of this intellectual inheritance. The Western left’s anti-imperialism, vanguardism, disdain for liberal paternalism and redemptive violence was retrofitted to the immutable, unfalsifiable religious narratives of the Middle East. The object shifted from class to civilisation, from bourgeois decadence to jahiliyya, but the structure of thought remained intact. Israel, small enough to be defeated yet symbolically vast enough to embody ‘the system,’ became indispensable in this ideological architecture.

The reluctance to acknowledge this story arises from a familiar reflex: the comforting conviction that the politics of the radical Left are, by definition, the cause of decent people everywhere. Any corruption or violence associated with the radical Left must be the work of a few bad men betraying an otherwise noble revolution – the attitude long applied to mass repression in the Soviet Union.

That reflex does not survive even the most cursory glance at history. The record is unmistakable: the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, Lenin’s repression of the kulaks, Stalin’s purges, Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward,’ Fanon’s sanctification of revolutionary violence, and the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. In the light of the radical Left’s ideological merger with Islamism and its lionisation of Iran’s Islamic revolution, its delight at the massacres of October 7 and its mourning of Khamenei make perfect sense.

Footnotes

[ii] James H. Billington, ‘Epilogue: Beyond Europe’ in Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, Basic Books, 1980, pages 505-509.

[iii] Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pages 62–65.

[iv] Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism, W. W. Norton & Company, 2003, page 86.

[v] Jason Burke, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, Bodley Head, 2025, page 280.

[vi] Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism, W. W. Norton & Company, 2003, page 109.

[vii] Jason Burke, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, Bodley Head, 2025, page 377.

[viii] Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, Chicago University Press, 2005, pages 81-85.

First published in Fathom

The post The radical Left’s merger with Islamist despotism first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

StandWithUs Nederlands organized a four-city Dutch lecture tour for me this week. With flights from Tel Aviv canceled, I addressed three university audiences remotely. At Delft University of Technology, Palestinian hooligans tried intimidating me and shutting me down… via Zoom.

They failed.

Trying to shut down a Zoom lecture feels particularly pathetic and cowardly. It’s as anti-intellectual as razoring out a page from a textbook. It shows a fear of the ideas themselves.

Denouncing my invitation, anti-Zionists smashed over 25 plate-glass windows in two nights of vandalism. Their graffiti proclaimed: “Stop your Zionist war propaganda” and “stop zios.”  They spread butyric acid — a slimy substance smelling like vomit — on two buildings. They’re engineers, after all. StandWithUs changed the location. I began my lecture “Anti-Zionist Rhetoric on University Campuses: An Academic and Zionist Response,” empathizing: “It’s hard to be a Jew on campus. It’s hard to be a Palestinian on campus, too.” I added that I never characterize “the” Palestinians — demonizing people. Instead, I criticize actions, political culture, charters, rhetoric, terrorism.

To inspire, I told a story of another student at a top technical university, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In 1967, nineteen-year-old Anatoly Shcharansky noticed the anti-Semitic jokes targeting him change in six days. Instead of calling him weak and cowardly, Jew-haters called him a bully… following Israel’s Six Day War victory. Curious about how a country 2,700 kilometers away so affected him, he launched his Jewish and Zionist journey. In discovering his identity, he discovered his freedom, becoming today’s Zionist activist and human rights warrior, Natan Sharansky.

The “anti-Semite doesn’t make the Jew,” I explained. The Jew, the Zionist, makes the Jew. Beyond explaining how anti-Zionists – particularly mainstream Palestinian nationalists –fortified their anti-Zionism with traditional anti-Semitism, I wanted to end by celebrating Zionist empowerment, and liberal-democratic nationalist optimism, for Jews and non-Jews alike.

Air-raid sirens wailed in Jerusalem just as I began.

I was in my basement office. Although, it may not have been my most prudent decision, I kept lecturing. I’m an educator. I didn’t want to miss a thoughtful campus conversation about these issues.

Ultimately, the sirens weren’t what bothered us.

Within minutes, seven keffiyeh-masked hooligans intruded, to disrupt the event. Campus security watched haplessly – this university doesn’t remove protesters menacing speakers. The browbeaters condemned StandWithUS as “Zionist” — God forbid. “We will not allow fascists, we will not allow Zionists, we will not allow racists, nobody that comes to spread hate in our university is allowed in this campus…” the ringleader said, “because Gil Troy, and I quote…. has called the Palestinians ‘Morally Bankrupt… bloodthirsty… and Jew-hating.’ This is deeply offensive and harmful language that promotes hatred and the dehumanization of an entire group….”

University of Ottawa demonstrators spewed the same misquotations at me last February — for anyone doubting the movement’s mass manipulation globally. But anyone paying attention could see the contrast between my professorial attempts at nuance and their menacing close-mindedness. “He just said it’s hard to be a Jew in the university” — and a Palestinian — the organizer said, inviting them to participate.

Instead, they chanted, often reading off an iPhone: “Say it loud, say it clear: We don’t want any Zionists here.” They yelled “We don’t want any Zionist teachers,” and that perennial favorite, “Free Free, Palestine.” I couldn’t respond effectively via Zoom to this surreal, impotent, attempt at long-distance intimidation. The other students seemed unruffled by this empty, performative gesture. Somehow, StandWithUS found another room quickly and I finished with no further interruptions.

That’s when I got depressed. Even worse than the Palestinian Ku-Klux-Klanners cowering behind their keffiyehs, were the robotic questioners who sat quietly through the lecture. Their questions broadcast the affectless, programmed zealotry of Soviet Commissars. Their questions – actually accusations – came straight from the Palestinian propaganda playbook, obsessed with delegitimizing Israel because of its supposed original sins in 1948. It’s Palestinian Perseveration, “the uncontrollable, repetitive continuation of a behavior, speech, thought, or emotion long after the original stimulus has ended.” Anti-Zionist automatons have been emitting the same biased nonsense for decades, worldwide.

I try to be respectful – with limits. I listened to every question – but cut off abusive libels alleging “white supremacy,” that Jews treat “goyim … like cattle” and that Israel “poisoned Palestinian water.” When one questioner prefaced a more-substantive critique calling me racist, fascist, and an academic disgrace, I said I’d answer the second half despite the insults.  When another student called me a fraud because “nations don’t have the right to exist, only people’s do,” I invoked my Quebec years where French Canadians, like Palestinians, and dozens of other peoples, have a national consciousness and aspriations but no state. While patiently – not defensively – debunking the worst lies, I kept going meta. I wondered if they subjected any other nation to such a one-sided indictment, or harped on long-ago sins to doubt their own country’s legitimacy. I asked if they criticized any Palestinian actions, ever. I also invoked historical analogies including India-Pakistan circa 1948, while rejecting this obsession with trying to pivot all of history and politics today around your one particular favorite date.

When teaching in person, I scan, seeing who is open to listening, while relating to the unreceptive interrogator. It’s harder to do when you’re Zoomed into a lecture hall.

I like to think I raised some issues and offered framings people hadn’t considered before. But the evening’s Legion of Unfair Accusers hijacked the evening far more effectively than the disrupters did.  They set the Q-and-A’s tone, negating my talk’s focus, substance, romance, optimism, and nuance. They came to play Zionist Whac-a-mole, wielding the most cliched mallets.  It was like only being asked about Southern slavery after lecturing about America’s New Deal. This experience should clarify two debates roiling the Jewish world. First, some thoughtful intellectuals treat “Anti-Zionism” as a philosophy, an intellectual movement, distinct from anti-Semitism. They see anti-Zionists reacting to various Western challenges or expressing particular jealousies regarding Israel’s ideological strengths.

Although I enjoy reading these insights, and object when Woke psychologists pushing “de-colonizing therapy,” mislabel Zionism as “a root cause of mental illness,” these obsessive anti-Zionists often broadcast psychological distress, transcending the philosophical. The masked bullies present as rageaholics addicted to hounding Zionists – and Jews, wherever and whenever possible. The tunnel-vision propagandists hooked on their 48-fixation present as flailing zealots ordering their increasingly-chaotic worlds around this one obsession. More important, such encounters are warning flares. Beware, anti-Zionists feed off Diaspora Jewish insecurities.  Many American Jews especially, fear being outflanked on the left, becoming unpopular, exposed as un-hip.

Many of us have invested decades in updating, debating, refining, redefining, reviving, Zionism and the Zionist conversation globally – with pride and not abject apologetics. That mission includes engaging those, old and young alike, troubled by Israeli policies, personalities, actions, and history, yet still open-minded and open-hearted. Investing even one Jewish communal dollar in wooing – or demonizing – Ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists (distinct from anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews), is worse than a waste of money. It risks empowering fanatics to prey on too many communal insecurities. And it will, inevitably, hijack the important, substantive, constructive, and lovingly-patriotic-even-if-critical conversations about Zionism, Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people, most Jews worldwide still seek – and deserve.

Published in the Jewish Journal

The post Anti-Zionists in the Netherlands Tried Disrupting My Zoom Lecture first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

The study findings point to sharp disparities, both in the scope of international media coverage and in the number of protests held in the United States around each of these issues.

Protests organized by various groups in response to the IDF’s entry into Rafah were nearly one hundred times more numerous than protests concerning Iran. Media coverage of the war in Gaza was almost double in volume compared to coverage of the protests in Iran during comparable time periods sampled for the study.

To enable a fair comparison, researchers selected two 22-day time windows. The first covered the protests in Iran, which lasted from December 28, 2025 until their decline on January 18, 2026, following reports that tens of thousands of demonstrators were massacred. The second examined one of the peak moments of the war in Gaza, the IDF’s entry into Rafah, over an identical 22-day period from May 6 to May 27, 2025. During this period, a social media campaign under the slogan “All Eyes on Rafah” spread widely and extensive protests took place on U.S. campuses.

The post The Dramatic Gap Between Global Coverage of the War in Gaza and the Massacre of Protesters in Iran first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.